Not Here, Not There, Not Anywhere

Politics, Social Movements, and the Disposal of Low-Level Radioactive Waste

Daniel J. Sherman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781933115917
• eBook ISBN: 9781136522062
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

In 1979, provoked by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, governors of states hosting disposal facilities for low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) refused to accept additional shipments. The resulting shortage of disposal sites for wastes spurred Congress to devolve responsibility for establishing new, geographically diffuse LLRW disposal sites to states and regional compacts, with siting authorities often employing socio-economic and political data to target communities that would give little resistance to their plans.
The communities, however, were far from compliant, organizing nearly 1000 opposition events that ended up blocking the implementation of any new disposal sites. Sherman provides comprehensive coverage of this opposition, testing hypotheses regarding movement mobilization and opposition strategy by analyzing the frequency and disruptive qualities of activism. In the process, he bridges applied policy questions about hazardous waste disposal with broader questions about the dynamics of social movements and the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. The issues raised in this book are sure to be renewed as interest grows in nuclear power and the disposal of the resulting waste remains uncertain.

CHAPTER 1

NOT HERE, NOT THERE, NOT ANYWHERE: AN INTRODUCTION

In the summer of 2008, newspapers in Pennsylvania reported that nuclear power plants, research facilities, hospitals, and other commercial producers of low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) in the state could no longer ship their contaminated by-products to South Carolina for disposal. Some of the LLRW materials with the lowest and shortest-lived radioactivity, like most of those generated from medical procedures, could be managed on-site until stable enough to handle safely or shipped more than 2,000 miles away for final disposal at a facility in Tooele County, Utah. But other materials with higher, riskier, and longer-lived radioactivity, such as contaminated resins, tools, and parts from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, now had no available disposal options. Commercial generators of LLRW in 35 other states also found themselves in this position.

This news mirrored stories nearly 30 years prior, when the state of South Carolina turned back a shipment of LLRW consisting of materials from the near core meltdown of the Three Mile Island power plant in 1979. Washington and Nevada, the other two host states of LLRW disposal facilities, soon joined South Carolina in restricting disposal access and demanding a new federal policy governing radioactive waste. The resulting Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act (LLRWPA) of 1980 and its subsequent amendments were designed to provide a multitude of new LLRW disposal sites equitably distributed across the United States. In fact, Pennsylvania has been joined for the past 24 years under this law with Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia in the Appalachian Compact and charged with establishing a regional LLRW facility. Although the Appalachian Compact continues to exist as a legal entity, its office was closed and its operations were terminated in 1998. No regional compact or state has successfully established a new site to receive LLRW under the LLRWPA—yet the law remains.

In 1979, the restrictions on LLRW disposal caused panic among LLRW generators, state governments, and Congress. Representative Morris K. Udall, from Arizona, argued that without passage of the LLRWPA, “we would be faced with the prospect of our hospitals and research institutions, as well as commercial nuclear power facilities, being forced to shut down” (Congressional Record1980a, 34130). By the mid-1980s, states and regional compacts had engaged in a flurry of site selection processes for new LLRW facilities under the LLRWPA. The new law ushered in what the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) called the “era of state responsibility” for the disposal of LLRW. In fact both the National Governors Association (NGA) and National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) had actively lobbied Congress for state control over disposal of commercially generated LLRW. Congress took the unprecedented step of devolving responsibility for the disposal of commercially generated LLRW to state governments and regional compacts by passing the LLRWPA. Between 1986 and 1993, individual states and regional compacts identified more than 20 U.S. counties as candidate sites for LLRW disposal facilities.

“Not here, not there, not anywhere!” was one of the slogans chanted by opponents to proposed LLRW disposal facilities in these candidate counties across the United States. Activists in these counties organized more than 900 events of collective public opposition, ranging from petition drives to clashes with state troopers by masked protesters on horseback. By 1999, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that “states, acting alone or in compacts, had collectively spent almost $600 million attempting to develop new [LLRW] disposal facilities. However, none of these efforts have been successful” (GAO 1999, 3). The opponents’ slogan seemed to be a reality.

This is a book about the implementation vulnerabilities of devolution and the political power of local collective action in the U.S. federal system. It explores the implementation vulnerabilities of the LLRWPA as the politics of LLRW disposal cycled through federal, state, and local levels of government. This political saga provides the ideal context from which to engage fundamental policy questions concerning the disposal of environmentally undesirable materials specifically, as well as the dynamics of local collective action and intergovernmental relations more generally.

An examination of implementation efforts under the LLRWPA reveals the power of local government and citizen opposition to thwart national policy objectives. Although states have preemptive authority over local governments, such as the candidate counties for LLRW sites, state officials lack the political will to implement the LLRWPA in the face of local opposition. Neither top-down nor bottom-up “voluntary” approaches to the siting process have successfully established new LLRW sites. Although active opposition was not constant across the candidate counties, and some states made more implementation progress than others, early and intense local opposition in some states altered the implementation calculus nationwide. Activists and local elected officials in many candidate counties effectively persuaded state officials to halt the search for LLRW sites. As implementation failed in these states, even states with candidate counties that were not mounting active opposition stopped their implementation efforts. This was due to a fear that the first newly created LLRW facility would not merely be one of many regional sites, but instead would become a national site and bear a disproportionate amount of the risks associated with LLRW disposal.

Yet despite the title of this book and the desires of LLRW opponents, the classical physics principle on the conservation of matter dictates that as long as the waste is generated, it must be going somewhere. And indeed, LLRW-producing activities continue in the United States, and the waste is going somewhere. Just as remarkable as the panic that ensued when LLRW disposal capacity was constricted in 1979 was the relative calm that greeted the 2008 closure of the Barnwell, South Carolina, LLRW facility. Although this closure left just two remaining facilities, it caused no panic and led to no response from lawmakers at the state or federal level. When asked if the Appalachian Compact would restart its search for a new LLRW site, the chief of nuclear safety at the Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania, one of the largest producers of commercial LLRW, explained that “economically, it wouldn’t make sense because the volume of trash stranded by the Barnwell closing is too small” (Lenton 2008, A1).

An unusual and unanticipated equilibrium took form under the LLRWPA even as the law failed in its stated purpose to establish new disposal sites equitably distributed across the states. The scarcity of disposal options led waste generators to pursue innovative waste reduction strategies. Dramatic reductions in waste volume eliminated the need for the multitude of new facilities the LLRWPA was designed to establish. At the same time, the authority granted to states and regional compacts under the LLRWPA enabled revenue-generating surcharges, disposal fees, and waste importation controls that made the continued acceptance of LLRW at existing sites attractive to host states. For the time being, commercial LLRW generators have succeeded in cobbling together an adequate combination of waste reduction measures, on-site interim storage, and limited disposal availability, even while local LLRW opponents and antinuclear activists have succeeded in thwarting the construction of regional LLRW facilities at fresh sites under the LLRWPA. Whether this unusual equilibrium remains in balance depends in large part on the continued survival of the devolutionary policy context created by the LLRWPA.

The 30 years of implementation efforts under the LLRWPA across local, state, and regional government units raise significant questions. First, in terms of policy formation, why did Congress devolve responsibility for commercial LLRW disposal to the state level? Why did states ask for this responsibility? And more remarkably, why was no consideration given to the possibility of local opposition? Second, in terms of implementation, how were the candidate sites for LLRW facilities chosen? What effect did the selection processes have on the eventual local opposition? Third, in terms of collective action and social movements, what determines the collective mobilization of local opposition? Why do different locales use different collective tactics of opposition? And what effects do varying levels of mobilization and varying tactics have on implementation? Finally, what does the interplay between devolutionary policy and local opposition imply for intergovernmental relations? How stable is the current policy context for LLRW generation and disposal?

These questions are relevant to policy contexts broader than merely the disposal of LLRW. Nuclear power, an energy source producing negligible greenhouse gas emissions, is currently enjoying a renaissance in the United States as a perceived solution to global warming. After nearly 30 years without any applications for new nuclear power plants in the United States, utilities have submitted 26 applications for new reactors. Both presidential candidates in the 2008 election endorsed the expansion of nuclear power as an energy solution. Yet neither the United States nor any other nation has successfully built a permanent waste site for radioactive waste. Yucca Mountain, Nevada, had been the preferred candidate site for high-level radioactive waste in the United States for more than 20 years and had even been considered an option for the disposal of LLRW after the LLRWPA failed to produce any new sites. In 2009, President Barack Obama and Congress effectively removed the site from consideration by defunding the project.

The determination of any new site selection process for radioactive waste from a new generation of nuclear power plants should be informed by the political dynamics of intergovernmental relations and social dynamics of mobilized local opposition that the failed LLRW siting attempts of the 1980s and 1990s brought to light. The current waste management balance for LLRW should also inform how decisionmakers and stakeholders think about the relationship between waste-producing activities and the availability of disposal. Even other energy sources that might be considered alternative solutions to global-warming and energy security problems and do not share the waste disposal problems of nuclear power, such as wind and solar, have had to engage implementation challenges during site selection reminiscent of the efforts to find LLRW disposal sites. With the passage of decentralized state policies dictating portfolio standards for alternative energy, utilities have faced implementation struggles to site both wind farms and large-scale solar projects. These struggles, such as the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts and the BrightSource solar project in the Mojave Desert, have included mobilization of local opposition and contentious relationships among local, state, and federal government actors. The BrightSource project shares both geography and an intergovernmental constellation of opposition forces with a 1990s candidate site for LLRW disposal.

A BRIEF SUMMARY

Each chapter of this book grapples with one or more the above questions. Chapter 2 examines more than 50 years of nuclear energy legislation, congressional hearings, debates, and other documents to clarify the context in which Congress decided to devolve responsibility for LLRW disposal to the states. This was a remarkable policy change in that radioactive waste policy has been historically dominated by a closed loop of technical experts within the federal bureaucracy. The fact that the NGA and NCSL pushed for the devolution of waste-siting responsibility is even more startling. The policy history reveals a federal nuclear bureaucracy that steadily lost environmental and safety credibility in the eyes of state governments. This trajectory of distrust had roots in the very design of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the dual roles assigned to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to at once promote commercial nuclear power and regulate the emerging industry. The agency pursued the former role at the expense of the latter, which led to the embarrassing risks to health and safety that caught the attention of both the media and other political actors, including state governments.

Throughout the 1970s, the states had been demanding greater decisionmaking authority over nuclear facilities operating within their boundaries. This state encroachment into the regulation of nuclear policy developed in response to the revelation of federal regulatory shortcomings during the 1960s and 1970s. The near meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 was the most infamous example of more than a decade of inadequate federal regulation. In 1980, the states actively lobbied the federal government for more decisionmaking authority over all types of radioactive waste disposal. The federal government devolved disposal responsibility of LLRW to states as a token, while it jealously guarded authority over high-level waste disposal. The policy history leading to passage of the LLRWPA contains important lessons about the cumulative and layered nature of political development and policy change, as well as the role subjective problem definitions play in the formation of policy solutions.

Chapter 3 examines the site selection processes that state siting authorities followed as they attempted to implement the LLRWPA. The design of the 1980 law was blind to two key intergovernmental dynamics: the pressure local politics can place on state political actors and the interstate dynamics of waste avoidance. Amendments to the LLRWPA in 1985 placed strict timelines on state siting processes and threatened harsh penalties for states that failed to advance an LLRW disposal solution for waste generated within their borders. This seemed to address the latter intergovernmental blind spot in the original law, and states began to identify candidate sites for LLRW facilities in 1986. By this time, the phenomenon of local opposition to waste siting was well known and even feared by state siting authorities to such an extent that it became part of the LLRW problem definition. There is evidence in many cases that concern regarding the potential power of local opposition led siting authorities to augment technical site selection criteria with demographic profiles designed to identify acquiescent communities. Relative ratio environmental justice analysis shows that an overwhelming majority of the candidate sites were located in counties with disproportionately high low-income populations. If those charged with identifying new LLRW sites did indeed intend to avoid local opposition, the effort failed. Content analysis of letters to the editor in local papers for every day of the siting processes across 21 candidate sites shows not only overwhelming opposition to the LLRW facilities, but also a strategic refusal of opponents to engage arguments typically associated with the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) frame of meaning—a frame that siting authorities often conjured to depict the public as “poorly informed, interested primarily in avoiding local imposition of risks, and emotive rather than cognitive in its appraisal of the risk and in its response to siting proposals” (Kraft and Clary 1993, 96). Instead, opposition activists deftly juxtaposed the technical criteria established to guide site selection with the socioeconomic and political aspects of the siting processes employed by siting authorities—creating a sophisticated injustice frame that attacked the technical competence and democratic legitimacy of the siting agencies and contractors. This frame would prove to motivate significant active opposition in the candidate communities. The site selection processes and the generation of local opposition demonstrate the multifaceted nature of local power. In seeking to avoid opposition, siting authorities selected candidate sites in part on demographics thought to be associated with resources of political power, such as income. And in adding such considerations to the site selection criteria, the authorities were leveraging their power over the decisionmaking process, or “rules of the game.” Yet opponents were able to leverage the power of widely shared meaning by painting these strategies as incompetent, illegitimate, and unjust.

Chapters 4 and 5 take a closer look at the mobilization of active local opposition to LLRW facilities across the 21 candidate counties. Even though opposition was prevalent in each of the candidate counties, the number and type of collective acts of public opposition they were able to muster varied. Newspaper analysis of collective opposition events reveals a wide range of frequency in events of active opposition across these cases, as well as significant variation in the predominant tactics employed to oppose LLRW site proposals. Interestingly, just as state siting authorities failed to identify acquiescent communities, theories of social movements have difficulty explaining variations in the frequency and type of active opposition across these cases. If the siting authorities overlooked the local power of meaning, social movement theory undersells the power of movement. By overemphasizing static, preexisting community characteristics and political opportunities, the classic social movement model misses the dynamic relationships between and among political actors that shape political outcomes. The identification and analysis of repeated patterns of social mechanisms across carefully paired candidate counties, based on scores of in-depth interviews, lend a detailed understanding of mobilization by different political actors in a variety of contexts.

Chapter 6 examines the effects the frequency and type of active local opposition had on implementation progress across the 21 candidate counties. Active local opposition by citizens and local governments effectively halted implementation of the LLRWPA, although not all candidate counties were removed from the siting process at the same rate or for the same reasons. Although none of the counties came to host an LLRW facility, some were dropped early in the implementation process, whereas others had actually been licensed for construction before implementation failed. There is a significant negative relationship between the number of collective acts of public opposition in a candidate county and progress toward implementation. The more active the opposition, the quicker the siting process ended for the candidate county. The number of disruptive acts of collective opposition was not, however, significantly related to implementation progress. Qualitative evidence demonstrates that early and active opposition of all types quickly drew support from local and then state officials, which ultimately halted the siting process.

The most dramatic example of this occurred in New York, where LLRW opponents eventually won the support of Governor Mario Cuomo, who successfully challenged the constitutionality of the LLRWPA and its amendments. In New York v. United States (1992), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the most stringent incentive for states to create new LLRW disposal sites—the “take title” provision, which would have punished states noncompliant under the LLRWPA implementation milestones by requiring them to assume liability for all commercial wastes generated within their borders. In the absence of the “take title” incentive, many states facing active local opposition halted the LLRW siting process. At this point, states began competing to avoid the creation of an LLRW facility within their boundaries. Even states that had designed voluntary site selection approaches and offered generous compensation packages failed to find willing hosts. Eventually, states that had made significant implementation progress because they had not faced local active opposition began to seek ways to stall or halt the LLRW siting process. In these cases, state-level officials intervened to halt the siting process once implementation was failing nationwide, out of a fear that the first newly constructed LLRW site would ultimately be a national site in perpetuity.

Interestingly, in this context, willing hosts did emerge to dispose of the nation’s commercially generated LLRW. They were not, however, new sites created under the LLRWPA. Chapter 7 concludes by describing the LLRW disposal situation that settled in after the states and regional compacts failed to build new sites. The two states hosting existing LLRW facilities continued to accept waste while exercising their authority to levy surcharges and regulate the flow of out-of-state waste. Washington accepted waste only from member states of the Northwest and Rocky Mountain Compacts, while South Carolina joined a compact with New Jersey and Connecticut but continued to accept waste from other states for a hefty fee until 2008. In 1995, Utah licensed a private LLRW facility outside of the LLRWPA but under agreement with the Northwest Compact at a repurposed site for hazardous and naturally occurring radioactive waste. This facility is operated by the EnergySolutions company and is licensed by Utah to accept only the least radioactive category of LLRW. The Northwest Compact and Utah have agreed to allow the facility to accept this category of waste from states outside of the compact. As this book goes to press, Texas seems poised to follow Utah’s example and license a private LLRW disposal facility in an area already used for hazardous and radioactive waste processing. Texas is joined in a compact with Vermont and will likely accept all categories of LLRW that the South Carolina site had accepted, while collecting the hefty stream of revenue that site collected.

This is a far cry from the evenly distributed network of more than a dozen regional LLRW disposal sites Congress envisioned when passing the LLRWPA. H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. NOT HERE, NOT THERE, NOT ANYWHERE: AN INTRODUCTION
• 2. THE HALF-LIFE OF FEDERAL RESPONSIBILITY: THE DEVOLUTION OF LLRW DISPOSAL
• 3. GLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS: NIMBY, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND THE FRAMING OF LLRW SITE SELECTION
• 4. POWER GENERATION: ACTIVE OPPOSITION TO LLRW SITE PROPOSALS
• 5. CRITICAL MASSES: DISRUPTIVE VERSUS CONVENTIONAL FORMS OF ACTIVE OPPOSITION
• 6. RADIOACTIVE DECAY: IMPLEMENTATION FAILURE
• 7. PREDICTABLE DISINTEGRATION AND STABILITY: THE FRAGILE EQUILIBRIUM OF LLRW DISPOSAL POLICY
• APPENDIX
• REFERENCES
• INDEX